Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
Making A Difference – Thoughts, Observations and Opinions
This is Dave Brock’s Blog.
It offers my views on a variety of business, sales, marketing, and leadership topic. My goal is to make a difference for you, the reader, in both your professional and personal lives.
Latest Posts
What Pisses Me Off About Gartner’s “Spaghetti Chart”
My friends at Gartner published a really important chart a couple of years ago. It looked at the real buying journey and the difficulty customers have in buying. In some circles, it’s become known as the “spaghetti chart.” (Actually it gives spaghetti a bad rap). For those of you that don’t know about it, it’s pictured below. The Gartner research shows, vividly, that the customer buying journey is not linear. They don’t move in a disciplined fashion from problem identification to solution exploration to requirements building to supplier selection. Instead the wander, start and stop, change their minds, go backwards, […]
Leadership Is Not About “Monitoring”
Too often when I speak to sales managers, they focus on “monitoring” their sales people. They constantly focus on: Where they are on MTD, QTD, YTD numbers? Do their pipelines have the right volume/velocity of opportunities? Are the sales people hitting their goals on prospecting calls, customer meetings, and so forth? Are they keeping CRM and other systems updated? …….and on and on. When they see someone not hitting those goals or not “complying” with the standards, they take corrective action, which usually is manifested by: You aren’t hitting your numbers, you need to get going! You need more deals […]
“I won’t pay more than $X!”
We were doing a deal review. It was a big deal with a prestigious customer. Procurement was involved. As we discussed the deal, the sales person said: “Procurement thinks this is a good solution, but they aren’t willing to pay more than $X and we are a whole lot more at Y.” “Have you presented the business case to the procurement folks?” I asked. “We’ve talked about how much this improves productivity and reduces costs, we’ve provided some industry data….” replied the sales person. “But have you provided a specific business case to them?” I asked. “No, they’re stuck on […]
Getting The Cart Before The Horse, Sales Automation
Technology and automation can enable each of us to be much more efficient, and sometimes more impactful/effective. In our company, we couldn’t achieve what we do without our technology stack. In some ways, it’s an appendage we couldn’t manage to live without. Having said that, it’s not the technology that drives performance. Think about it for a moment. If it were the technology that drove performance, we wouldn’t see the disparity in performance from different companies using the same technology. If it were technology, one would see uplifts in performance of all organizations using the technology, but we don’t. Unfortunately, […]
Changing The Questions, Manager’s Version
I wrote, Changing The Questions, discussing how our questioning strategies tend to serve us, not help the customer think about their situations, what they are trying to achieve, and what they might learn. Turns out, managers are just as bad in the questions they ask sales people. (Perhaps, that’s why sales people are so bad.) Managers tend to ask questions that are helpful to them, but not to the sales people. For example: When is this deal closing? What value? Can you bring it in sooner? Can you bring it in at a higher value? Are you really sure this […]
Meet “Bob”
Meet “Bob,” Bob is the diagram below. I wish I could take credit for the brilliance underlying Bob, but the credit goes to one of my favorite clients, a top performing sales organization in the semiconductor industry. Bob is a discussion of virtually any type of business opportunity or challenge your customer faces. But it is probably very unfamiliar, because very few sales people assess their customers’ problems–and how they can help in this way. The problem is, this is the way business managers in all of your customers assess their problems. The red represents financial losses of some sort. […]